10 Branding Tips For Successful Small Business

Digital disruption has shifted the power from companies to customers. Days are gone when the companies used to build a brand. Today’s customers build the brand.

The overall experience has become the center factor of great brands.

Good news is you really don’t require a huge budget to allocate for brand building. You have to just design the experience across the various touch points. If you do it perfectly then your customer will share that experience with their network. Hence they knowingly or unknowingly start working to make your business a brand.

So what exactly require to do for building a brand?

1. Put Your Customer first

   Marty Neumeier’s definition of a brand: “a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a company or product” seems to be the common idea of what a brand is. That it is not owned by the company itself but its customers and product owners. So, this definition making the point quite clear that it is customers who own the brand. There is no point keeping anyone or anything else first when all power resting with your customers. Learn about your customer, understand their behavior and design your product or service accordingly.

2. Design the brand identity across the various touch points

   When a customer engages with your company, he/she simply goes through various touch points. You should design meaningful and memorable identities across the touch point.  So your customer can recall and remember you by symbols.

3. Position for exactly what you are

   Positioning is most important part of branding. You have to introspect that who are you? and why you exist? Honest answer of those two questions should reflect in your marketing communications.

4. Keep it simple

   Simplicity is profound. Keep yourself simple and transparent.

5. Involve your staff

   Your employees are the first row of brand champions. You have to involve them while creating and nurturing the brand. So they can feel associated and believe in the brand for which they are working.

6. Develop a brand plan

   The roadmap is very important part of your brand building exercise. Your brand stands for some values. How you will communicate or deliver those values to your customers should be planned.

7. Brand guideline for different media

   Many people will be involved in communication internally and externally. They will use your identities in various media ( Image, Audio, Video etc. ). You can not monitor and guide all everytime. So you should prepare brand guidelines of various uses.

8. Be consistent

   Consistency is key. Here I am not talking about identities and communications but customer experience also. Keep all consistent, so customers can form a perception and share their experience.

9. Review

   Keep reviewing all aforementioned ideas and make all necessary corrective actions.

10. Professionalism has no substitute

    Though all mentioned point sounds simple but making all things actionable requires a great deal of professionalism. So I suggest you to hire experienced professionals or agency to do all work.

Conclusion

A brand is a promise to the customer or product owner of the type of value or opportunity the company or product offers you in a given situation. Its goal is to position the offer so that it is visible, understandable, relevant and believable in the category itself.

If you do it right. You will find your brand name is the most valuable asset in your book of accounts.

Here Purple House Media put it all together in a single infographic. Go through it.